Imagining downtown Albany’s future

How can downtown Albany reach its potential as an urban center? That’s a question city leaders discussed yesterday at the launch of a new project called Impact Downtown Albany.

The hope is to position downtown, the warehouse district and the waterfront as a hub for a broad range of activities, from shopping to restaurants to cultural institutions. From today’s story:

The plan is to spend the next nine to 12 months gathering ideas and fostering collaborations to start improvements, little by little. Part of this will be done through a strategy called “tactical urbanism,” or the use of small-scale market trials, such as temporary pop-up stores, to test the viability of business ideas.

And while the hope is that those small projects will begin over the next couple of months, Tuesday’s event was also an opportunity to talk about what Albany will be like decades from now.

Most of that far-in-the-future talk took place at the day’s end, in a Pecha Kucha presentation, which is a Japanese term that refers to sharing ideas quickly and visually. Five people— including Mayor-elect Kathy Sheehan — presented five-minute snapshots of their vision for the future of downtown Albany.

Etc. may have a point, but building new housing will only work if there is pent-up demand. Also, it will take years to obtain planning approvals, then design and build the buildings. It depends on third parties not under the city’s control, and may hurt surrounding communities, rather than help the region as a whole.

Mike D. has a good point in the blight thread. Cities that tax land rather than improvements were hurt less in the recent depression. But, completely revamping the city’s tax structure would probably take years.

There is something the city can do on its own, relatively quickly, that been successful elsewhere: traffic calming.